Assessing Social Work Students’ Attitudes Related to Cultural Diversity

Abstract

The education of social work students with regard to issues of social and cultural diversity has been a mandate of the Council on Social Work Education for over a decade. This mandate requires social work educators to increase students’ awareness of their own biases and to evaluate changes in students’ attitudes as they are exposed to content on diverse populations. In this endeavor, valid and reliable measures of attitude change can be a useful evaluation tool to assess instructional effectiveness. This article summarizes a variety of available instruments for measuring attitudes toward race, ethnicity, gender, sex stereotyping, physical disability, and age.